Took the board back first thing this morning (well almost first thing, it's crazy how a little bit of snow at the side of the road seems to freak so many people out).
They tested it and agreed that Vcore was indeed very low, so they replaced the board. They said they'd had a few problems with that board, that should have set alarm bells ringing, and I should have got them to test the new board.
Got home and assembled the system - I couldn't believe it, Vcore was even lower (1.53V when it should have been 1.65V). Needless to say, I took it straght back, but of course ran into the problem that the engineers were at lunch (out to lunch?).
I eventually got it looked at, and refused to have another of the same sort - an XFX NF24 (that's Nforce 2 400 to you and me). They had no problem with that, in fact they were going to suggest it themselves. But they are in the technical department and they aren't allowed to swap one part for a different make, so all they could do was give me a credit note. That's actually not true, I've done it before, but lunchtime staff.
I then had to go through a door into the shop area, order a new board (Asus A7N8X-X), wait in the queue (it was lunchtime remember) for my order to be processed while in the background the board was picked from the warehouse, pay the 6 pence difference in price (which they wouldn't have bothered about if they had done it in the technical dept) and come home with my new board.
The new board is much better, I can run it at 12x166MHz instead of 15x133MHz, which means that the memory and I/O access is much better. If I needed to I could have adjusted Vcore, but it was reading bang on 1.65V. I was disappointed to find that it is only running in single channel mode, so I went to the Asus website to find out how to enable dual channel model And the simple answer is that I can't. The Nforce2 400 chip does not support dual channel mode.
So not only do XFX make crappy motherboards, they are also lying in their installation manual when they tell you to use slots A1 and B1 to enable dual channel mode. But then again they claim the board has Nforce2 SPP Northbridge chip but it doesn't It's no wonder I couldn't work out whether it was in dual channel mode before.
Ah well, at least it is working properly now. Just got to start the OS installation. And as soon as that's done it is going to my friends house, I'll be glad to see the back of it, so I'm sorry, no pictures.
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